–Dan Kelly, Attorney
A couple of weeks ago, Forrester Research issued a report called “The Purchase Path of Online Buyers in 2012.” The report has a great deal of interesting information, two pieces of which underscore points I have hammered here for a while. First, the report notes that “[d]irect traffic is critical to sales:”
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
In the past on these pages, I have been hard on Apple Inc. for apparent missteps in securing trademark rights to some of its more well-known products (iPhone, iPad). Last week, Apple landed a victory on the domain name front, winning a Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Procedure (“UDRP”)
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
Among the most ingrained Christmas traditions I recall from my youth was watching the Charlie Brown Christmas Special every year. For many, many years, that Special was “brought to you by Dolly Madison.” (And it was always preceded by this intro–a classic!)
Dolly Madison is but one of many brands owned
A recent domain name decision under ICANN’s Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP Policy), captioned Bin Shabib & Associates (BSA) LLP v. Hebei IT Shanghai ltd c/o Domain Administrator, found reverse domain name hijacking, under some rather interesting, if not questionable circumstances. The Rules that govern the UDRP Policy define Reverse Domain Name HiJacking
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
This reminder is a bit late for new Christmas-season consumer products, but it bears repeating year round, as companies contemplate new products: buy domain names associated with a new product before announcing the new product. This seems like an obvious thing to do, but I regularly read stories where companies fail to
.png)
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
A bomb exploded in the domain name aftermarket world on Wednesday. A well-known domain name auction house called SnapNames.com announced that one of its (now former) employees had been bidding as a shill in many online domain name auctions run by the company since 2005. SnapNames has an FAQ page on the matter here.
It is not difficult to decry the many abuses that have gone on in the domaining industry: cybersquatting, typosquatting, domain name tasting, domain name kiting, pay-per-click fraud, and now shill bidding (to name a few). As these abuses tend to make for the juciest news, it is not surprising that some (including trademark attorneys) accuse the whole domain name business (or “industry”) of being dirty. But law, being a generally slow, blunt instrument, has so far caught up with only the first two of the abuses listed above. What is less widely reported is that, for all of its wild-westness, the DN business has policed itself (e.g. cybersquatting, domain tasting) without resort to government intervention. This is as it should be.
Even so, self-policing is also slow to catch up to opportunists, so caveat emptor is the rule of the day in domain name transactions, especially when bidding at an auction, especially an online auction. I recommend reading any auction site’s rules, terms and conditions carefully before engaging in a transaction. Some of these sites will readily represent both buyer and seller, which is a situation well-known to lawyers and real estate agents as a “conflict of interest.” Caveat emptor, indeed.Continue Reading Fraud at Domain Name Auction House
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
In giving advice in the field of intellectual property, one hackneyed phrase repeatedly crosses my lips: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
When it comes to protecting a brand or trademark on the Internet, I may start saying, “an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.”